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Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages

Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now.

I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products.

A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase).

Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc.

Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content.

Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue.

If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!

If you can swing it from a development standpoint option #1 is how I would handle this.

If not, using rel canonical in one of the ways described below would suffice. However, you'd still have that many more product URLs for Google to crawl (even if they don't index them), which is why it is my second choice.

As I said, that would be a good second choice, but I'd go with the first option (putting all product variants like size/color on the same page and allowing the user to select which one/s they want to purchase) because the other options still leave a potentially huge amount of product URLs out there for Google to crawl.

Google has to crawl them to see the rel canonical tag. You may only have a certain amount of crawl budget. If you can cut down the amount of URLs on your site that Google has to crawl by as much as half simply by allowing users to select a variant color or size on a product page I think that is best for SEO, as well as for user experience.

I agree with Everett from a standpoint of User Experience. It could potentially be better for users if they appeared on a product page where they could then choose color, size, etc. variables for their product instead of having to click through multiple pages to find the right one or scroll through a huge list of variations.

The reduction in pages should also help consolidate link equity and keep pages from cannibalizing each other in the SERPs.

As for Takeshi's suggestion on Canonicals, I'm a fan of the rel=canonical tag but the potential problem with using them in this instance is twofold. 1) As Takeshi mentioned: "as far as Google is concerned you only have 1 page with the content on it" and 2) Canonicals are suggestions not directives so the search engines may choose not to recognize it if not used properly.

Thanks Mike. It certainly sounds like moving all SKUs onto 1 page is preferable. I suspect that I may need to spend a bit of dosh getting the website's on-page structure amended if going down this approach.

With regards to point 1, I assume the pages will still be crawled but any link equity would be passed to the canonicalised version of the page?

Another option is to create a category type page that lists all the product variations on it, then canonical each of the individual products to the category page. That way, you still have multiple product pages, but as far as Google is concerned you only have 1 page with the content on it.

Similar to what BJS1976 and Takeshi stated, the way we handled the bulk of duplicate content issues from a similar circumstance for our ecommerce site was handling the different varieties of the same product through parameters and then canonicalizing the parameters to the version of the URL sans parameter.

For example, due to database reasons /product1.php?color=42 and /product1.php?color=30 are the same product but one is red and one is blue, the pages are exactly the same & have radials/buttons/dropdowns to choose any available color, /product1.php would default to one specific variation we chose (usually the best selling color) and then /product1.php?color=42 and /product1.php?color=30 had a rel=canonical tag added pointing at /product1.php

For any remaining products flagged as duplicates that couldn't be fixed that way, we set those aside to have myself and another copywriter work on creating further content that would set them apart enough as to not be duplicates.

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